Wales Transition Lab:
Reconnecting food, health and nature at nation-scale
The North Star Transition Approach In Practice: Wales Transition Lab
There have been many conversations about the need for a shift of ambition and action on the future of food and wellbeing in Wales. Conversations have come tantalisingly close to addressing carbon, water, biodiversity and health in a way that ensures a secure future for farmers, citizens and nature but despite many good things happening, large-scale shift has felt too far away.
Check out the Wales Transition Lab, our project to reconnect food, health and nature at nation-scale - we seek to impact the system for all of Wales, a nation of 3 million people. Here’s what systemic change looks like in practice.
Update: Announcing the four founding ambitions of Wales Transition Lab - read Victoria Topham’s post on the Insights section of our website.
Applying the North Star approach to the Wales Transition Lab
1. Leverage creative diversity
We have invited directors from health, farming unions, NGOs, finance, engineering, conservation and water who have never sat around the same table before to hear each other’s stories and explore the overlaps where breakthrough value might be created. An example of that is seeing farmers working directly with health boards to improve nutrient levels in food, and in doing so, change gut biomes to prevent cases of Alzheimer’s and dementia.
2. Seek emergent practices
We ensure that no valid challenge is shelved just because it’s complex or emotive. Connecting health, environmental and economic outcomes and budgets has never been done effectively yet, but there’s no reason it shouldn’t happen if the right levels of patience, creativity and ambition are applied to the challenge.
3. Nurture communities of practice
We ask the tough question of “what would you set out to achieve if you took evidence at face value and knew you couldn’t fail” - recalibrating ambition to solve the problem, not to keep people comfortable.
4. Facilitate the transition
The involvement of the UCL Climate Action Unit in the Wales project has promoted the value of careful listening, reflection and fully standing in others’ shoes before leaping into ideas about solutions.
Find out more about the Wales Transition Lab
Farming
Farmers are feeling the increasingly chill winds of change from Brexit, both from the future of the subsidies model and the impact on them of the UK’s desired trade deals with countries with lower food standards. They also know that food tastes and diet are changing, yet few of them have the resources to plan and deliver the shifts that will assure the long-term wellbeing of their families and the land they farm.
Health
Medical practitioners experience the consequences of policy disconnects between food, diet, nutrition and poverty on a daily basis as they manage the challenges of wellbeing, mental health, obesity and Type II diabetes yet have no clear plan to close the gap between what works and scaled-up action. The Public Health professionals on whose long-term food system change might fall are rightly dealing with Covid-19 responses and have little time for addressing other burning issues.
Water
Water specialists across the land continue to wrestle with issues including drought, flooding, river pollution and biodiversity loss and the tension between biodiversity, economy and the needs of future generations.
The Wales Transition Lab: Reconnecting Food, Health and Nature, is a North Star project accelerating systemic change across the nation. The project challenges the status quo on how to manage food and its connections to land, health, environment and financial impacts by bringing together disconnected stakeholders (we think of them as unlikely allies). We find so many threads of interest that connect all of the systemic participants together.
Biodiversity
Soil health and biodiversity continue to decline, with the cost of their loss unpriced in the price of the food we eat and ambitious action for reversing their loss absent for most organisations.
Insurance
Insurers are all too aware of the scale of insurance pay-outs due to climate change impacts and of the relationship between soil quality, carbon and flood prevention, yet struggle to make lasting connections with land and farming policy.
Food
Citizens are ready to buy more locally-produced, unwrapped, fresher food but our producers and retailers are not yet in a position to drive this forward at pace and scale.
Photo credits: Anthony Beck / Pixabay / Picjumbo / Pembroke Herald /
Eberhard Grossgasteiger / Ella Olsson
The list goes on…
The North Star Transition team, led by Victoria Topham and Andy Middleton, is at work in Wales with our partner, UCL’s Climate Action Unit, bringing together leaders, researchers and practitioners from across Wales with the foresight and creativity to explore the possibilities that lie beyond the silos of organisational and sectoral boundaries.
We are seeking a sufficiently ambitious and engaging set of shared goals around which we can collaboratively build conversations, strategy and innovation that get the wheels of joined-up opportunity and action turning at speed.
Read Victoria Topham’s account of the four founding ambitions of the Wales Transition Lab.